Comment-Based Engagement Loops in TikTok Burger Promotion: Humour, Creator Persona, and User Participation in Indonesia

This study examines how humour, creator persona, and user participation shape comment-based engagement in TikTok food promotion. Using Aldi's Burger in Indonesia as an information-rich case, the research employs qualitative digital netnography of 25 TikTok videos and 2,250 public comments. The analysis combines video-level stimulus mapping and comment-level thematic coding guided by the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework as a qualitative sensitising lens. The findings show that absurd humour, recognisable creator persona, repeated promotional phrasing, product visibility, visual food cues, location cues, and comment affordances function as key promotional stimuli. Users interpret these cues through amusement, curiosity, persona familiarity, perceived authenticity, promotional evaluation, brand recall, and product interest. These interpretations are subsequently transformed into participatory practices, including parody, jargon repetition, tagging, product and location inquiries, support, criticism, consumption narratives, and user-to-user interaction. The study demonstrates that public comments are not merely engagement metrics or sentiment indicators. Instead, they function as recursive interactional mechanisms that reproduce, negotiate, amplify, and extend promotional meaning. Building on these findings, the study introduces the concept of a comment-based engagement loop, contributing to digital marketing scholarship by explaining how platform-mediated promotional meaning is continuously co-created through audience participation in TikTok comment environments.